1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a cooking apparatus for reading cooking information from a bar code and, more particularly, to a cooking apparatus and cooking system which allows a user to change cooking information based on the preferences of the user and the amount of food used during cooking food using automatic cooking information, and a cooking control method using the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
A general cooking apparatus uses a variety of heat sources to cook food. According to the heat sources, there are a variety of different products on the market. Among them, an electronic oven (also called a “microwave oven”) applies a high voltage to a magnetron, a high frequency oscillating tube, which generates microwaves at about 2450 MHz. The electronic oven causes the microwave to vibrate water molecules contained in food, and rapidly heats food using frictional heat generated by the vibration of water molecules.
In the case where the electronic oven is used to cook food, it usually allows a user to manually input cooking information such as cooking time, cooking temperature and a power level, through a key input unit mounted on the front panel of the electronic oven in the state of previously knowing food information well. However, this conventional electronic oven requires the user to manually input the cooking information.
Although food is designed to be conveniently cooked using the electronic oven, the variety of foods has increased recently, and the above method for manually inputting the cooking information is difficult and inconvenient to set suitable cooking conditions.
A bar code reading electronic oven has been developed to overcome this problem, which includes a bar code reader for scanning a bar code attached to the food package, and for reading cooking information such as cooking temperature, cooking time, a power level, etc. The bar code reading electronic oven cooks the food according to the cooking information acquired by the bar code reader. Hereinafter, the bar code reading electronic oven will be referred to as a cooking apparatus.
However, since the cooking apparatus scans the bar code attached to the food package using the bar code reader, reads the cooking information, and automatically cooks the food on the basis of the cooking information, the user cannot change a cooking state into a desired cooking state suitable to a preference of the user. Therefore, the user cannot satisfy the cooking state since the food is cooked in the state unsuitable to the preference of the user.
Therefore, since the user can not change some items (cooking temperature, cooking time or a power level) among overall cooking items of the cooking information and can not correct the cooking information, even when the user wants to change only a part of cooking items, it is difficult and inconvenient for the user to manually input overall cooking items (cooking temperature, cooking time, a power level, etc.) of the cooking information.
In addition, since the bar code attached to the food package provides cooking information with respect to the amount of food, when cooking a part of the food (for example, when cooking a smaller amount of food, or when cooking leftover food), the cooking apparatus can not utilize the cooking information acquired from the bar code, and it also requires the user to manually input overall cooking items.